Katharina Grosse, The Smoking Kid (Installation View), all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.

Now through June 21, Johan König in Berlin presents The Smoking Kid, a collection of new paintings by Katharina Grosse.  Grosse is known for her work employing bold colors and ambitious movement in order to transcend, open, and test the limits and boundaries defining space.  Color and gesture are central concerns of this artist, whose works are at once challenging and whimsical, and her current exhibition departs from Grosse’s typical method of large-scale sculptural installation, turning her abstract style instead towards work in which movement and color is tidily contained to the canvas instead of imposed onto walls and other three dimensional forms.

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The Art Newspaper notes the impact that the soaring price of the Swiss Franc has had on the market at Art Basel this year, pushing Switzerland’s high prices even higher, with prices about 15% higher than last year as a result.  “Even the bratwurst is unaffordable,” jokes Andreas Gegner of Sprüth Magers. (more…)

Richard Prince, Original (Installation View)

Richard Prince’s Original series is currently the subject of a new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, nestled at the gallery’s Upper East Side bookstore showroom, and using Prince’s ‘arrangements’ of soft-core adult novels with artworks created for their covers, showing the next step in the artist’s fascination with collecting, ownership and presentation.  An ardent, perhaps even obsessive collector himself, Prince often mines and unfolds worn and sometimes clandestine images, not only from vintage pulps, which serve for the selection here, but also from copies of influential literary pieces, a pattern the artist has studied throughout his career of media appropriations.  A devoted member of a group of artists who started experimenting with appropriation in the ‘70’s, Prince usually employs minimal alteration to his subject matter; rearranging, editing and sometimes even rephotographing what already exists. (more…)

A rare Bernini sculpture that many historians had thought lost or destroyed has been acquired by the Getty Museum.  The marble bust of Pope Paul V will “become one of a handful of the most important sculptures in the Getty’s collection, no question,” says Director Timothy Potts. (more…)

Candida Höfer, Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf I (2012), Image via Sean Kelly Gallery

Some of the more subtle technical and aesthetic currencies of architectural design are found in the details of space, namely, how that design deals with, circulates and shapes the spatial conceptions of any given construction. Throughout her career, Candida Höfer has captured these deep design concerns through brightly-lit and grand photographs, and the artist turns this gaze to Düsseldorf, Germany for her newest exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, a show of large C-Print photographs elegantly laid out throughout a two-floor, multi-series exhibition. Höfer’s work is presented in three parts: color photographs of grand interiors, multi-level buildings altered to form curving spirals, and even a series of much smaller-scale observations of space.

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Michael Heizer, Altars, via Art Observed

In Gagosian Gallery’s 24th Street Outpost, lithe, twisting steel platforms sprawl across the floor, smooth lines that undulate across the faded, industrial steppes that they lay across. In another room, an immense boulder hangs suspended from the ceiling, displayed in a case cut between two walls of the gallery so that viewers can see the rock’s sides from two separate rooms. The show could only be the work of Michael Heizer, one of the founding voices of American land art, whose new work continues his pioneering investigations into the construction of space and time along abstract, self-realized formats. (more…)

The Art Newspaper sits down with Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong to discuss a range of issues with the Guggenheim’s ongoing expansion plans in Finland and Abu Dhabi, including pressures to improve labor conditions through the sub-contractors working on the project.  “These are all questions that come under sovereignty; I feel unequipped to answer them,” Armstrong says.  “I can state our position: we are in constant dialogue with TDIC and other intergovernmental agencies. It really is top of my mind.” (more…)

Former banker Jonathan Weal is facing prison time after allegedly withholding information on his art collection during bankruptcy proceedings, a collection that included a work recently authenticated as a J.M.W. Turner seascape.  “Mr Weal was required by law to declare all property that he owns but failed to do so,” says prosecutor Klentiana Mahmutaj. (more…)

As the Broad Foundation prepares to open its Los Angeles Museum, its founders are on a major buying spree, buying about one work per week to bulk up its collection.  The museum already holds the world’s largest collection of works by Cindy Sherman, and is noted as having more Roy Lichtenstein works than anyone else outside the artist’s own foundation.   (more…)

Artist Marlene Dumas has been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St Anne’s Church in Freiberger Platz, Dresden, replacing the current work, which was damaged in WWII.  “They are giving me a lot of freedom. I can choose the form. The theme is also open,” Dumas says.  “The only ‘restriction’ is that [my painting] should not be too depressing. It should offer some hope.” (more…)

The Smithsonian has acquired the complete records of New York Gallery OK Harris, the renowned downtown dealers who helped launch the careers of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain, among others.  The collection of paperwork includes exhibition files, correspondence, and other documents from the career of Ivan and Marilynn Gelfmann Karp, the gallery owners. (more…)

Jake and Dinos Chapman are profiled in The Guardian this week, discussing their sprawling Hell installation, and the countless horrors occurring across its expanse of miniature figures, and the first draft of the work’s destruction in a massive warehouse fire.  “We heard the Momart warehouse was on fire and drove up to have a giggle because we thought it was full of other YBA art. Then we got a call saying Hell was in there,” Jake Chapman says.  “We just laughed: two years to make, two minutes to burn. A smart-assed journo phoned up and said: ‘Is it true that Hell is on fire?’ It was fantastic – like a work of art still in the process of being made, even as it burnt.” (more…)

This week, The Guardian looks at the fates of past years’ Serpentine Pavilion commissions, and their destinations after the work is taken down.  With most pavilions sold before they are installed, the article offers a look at the shifts in use and context as works appear in the gardens of Indian steel magnates, or used as a beachside restaurant in the Côte d’Azur in France. (more…)

In the Courtyard of Messe Basel

As the opening previews draw to a close in Basel today, the 46th edition of Switzerland’s massive art fair and exhibition is well underway, capping two initial days of strong sales and attendance during the VIP Previews that have set a brisk tone for the week’s proceedings. (more…)

Lucas Samaras, XYZ 1700 (2015), via Pace Gallery

On view at its 25th Street galleries, Pace is currently presenting Lucas Samaras’s exhibition Albums 2, featuring over 700 digitally enhanced photographs and a mirrored room installation.  Samaras’s exhibition showcases his continued exploration of manipulated imagery as a way of plumbing his own existence, this time playing through his autobiographical accounts with digital technologies. (more…)

Lee Ufan, (Installation View), via Bria Cole for Art Observed

If tranquility could serve as a physical construct, rather than a state of mind, then a state of calm could perhaps be considered as a reconditioning of vision, a way to perceive extended relations of time, material and space.  This sense of the perceptual retooling, and its effects, is one reading offered by Lee Ufan’s continuous series Relatum and Dialogue, the most recent version of which is currently on view at Pace Gallery.   The artist tends towards a relationship between philosophy and the objects he creates with artistic significance, in order to provoke subtle perceptual reconsiderations, as proposed in his writings and contributions to the Mono-ha school of artistic practice.

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Artist Bernar Venet’s Venet Foundation and Museum in Le Muy, France, is the subject of a New York Times profile this week, documenting the artist’s impressive collection of major American artists, including Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, which the artist often secured through barters or purchases on “friend rates.”  “Our works had no commercial value,” Mr. Venet says of the works he often traded his own pieces for. “We produced more than we sold.” (more…)

Bloomberg looks at the popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms among collectors, and its prominence in a number of major museum collections, including the recently opened Garage Center in Moscow.  “Russians loved Kusama,” says collector Inga Rubenstein. “The work is easy to understand because it’s so beautiful.” (more…)

Dasha Zhukova’s long-awaited Garage Center for Contemporary Art has opened in Moscow’s Gorky Park, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas from a repurposed Soviet-era dining canteen.  “We are very happy to work on turning the almost-ruin of vremena goda into the new house for garage,’ says Koolhaas. “We were able, with our client and her team, to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them.” (more…)

Climate change activists have concluded a 25-hour long protest against the Tate Modern’s sponsorship by British Petroleum, writing messages and critics on the Turbine Hall floor after facing down a potential use of police force that was not acted upon.  “It’s a back-down,” says Liberate Tate member and writer Mel Evans. “Maybe it’s a sign of how much the groundswell of public opinion has shifted that the Tate doesn’t feel like they can shut down this discussion.”

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Cecily Brown, The English Garden (Installation View), Rachel Williams for Art Observed

Currently at Maccarone Gallery are a set of intimately-sized canvases by painter Cecily Brown.  Aggressively captivating beyond their small boarders, the artist’s works here ignite a series of personal experiences as viewers stand inches away from canvases no more than 18 inches in height or width. Organized by novelist and art writer Jim Lewis, The English Garden contains garden scenes rather than traditional landscapes.  Sharp lines inside Brown’s expressionist marks create additional horizons that depict mysterious and often open-ended garden scenes. (more…)

Outside Art Basel, via Art Basel

The doors are set to open at Messeplatz in Basel, Switzerland this week, for the 46th edition of the Art Basel art fair, the massive fair exhibition that has come to define the early summer months in Europe.  Bringing the massively international scope of the world’s elite galleries, this year’s Art Basel promises another strong outing.  (more…)

An article in Bloomberg this week traces the path of stolen art from theft through to sale, accounting for the variations in strategy by thieves for maximizing returns on what are often considered unsellable works.  “Sometimes people don’t even recognize that the art’s gone missing” says Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, head of the FBI’s art-theft program. “It could be in a storage facility, or in the basement of someone’s house, and it can often be years before anyone notices it’s gone.”  (more…)

Artist Mark Bradford is profiled in the New Yorker this week, discussing his work, his early life growing up in Los Angeles, and his recent adventures into performance and stand-up comedy.  “I’d seen so many black male comics, with their untouchable heterosexual superiority,” he says. “I thought, well, why not do a piece where we shake that up a little bit?” (more…)